Kadiwéu

The 1,400 Kadiwéu are the last surviving group of Mbayá, who
were a large and powerful tribe that once controlled parts of Paraguay and
large parts of Brazil. Today, the Kadiwéu live on a large reserve
(established in 1903) between the Serra da Bodoquena and the
Nabileque-Niutaca and Aquidabán rivers in southern Mato Grosso,
Brazil (57° W, 22° S). They speak a Guaicuruan language.

In the eighteenth century the Mbayá numbered 4,000 and lived in a
highly stratified society. They did not then practice horticulture but
preferred to raid, enslave, and gather tribute from other peoples; the
introduction of the horse assisted them in these activities. By the end of
the eighteenth century, the Mbayá population had greatly diminished
owing to smallpox and influenza.

The Brazilian government granted the Kadiwéu a large parcel of land
in the Pantanal and the Serra de Bodoquena in gratitude for Kadiwéu
assistance in fighting off a Paraguayan invasion between 1865 and 1870. In
1870 some Kadiwéu moved to Argentina; their descendants in that
country now number 1,000. The Kadiwéu have leased or sold to cattle
ranchers most of the land that they received from the Brazilian
government. The Kadiwéu are hunters and foragers who have adopted
horticulture.

The Kadiwéu live in villages of fewer than twenty households,
although some families live independently in the jungle. Households may
include nuclear families or a collection of sisters and their nuclear
families, or they may be a group including slaves, their families, and
their owners and their families. Girls may marry after puberty, and boys
whenever they can find a wife, although the relative scarcity of women
means that men do not marry until quite a bit later than girls or women;
however, both may marry earlier if so arranged by their parents. Marriages
are quite unstable and short-lived, and only first marriages are
celebrated. The Kadiwéu are monogamous.

The slave class is made up of people captured from other tribes, and the
children and grandchildren of those captured. Slaves speak respectfully to
their owners, do what their owners tell them to do, and give part of what
they make to their owners.